<Begin Segment 10>

MN: Now, in April or May of 1941, your parents returned to Japan to join you and your brother. Was there already a sense that Japan might go, go into war with America?

FH: I think my dad, he was very keen in the international affairs and so forth, especially reading between the lines, so that he thought that, yes, it is unavoidable. And so he decided to return to Japan for the reason that he didn't want to be separated from us, you know. The kids are living in Japan, enemy country, and himself and my mother and my daughter, I mean, my sister, living in the United States. And so they all went to Japan.

MN: What were your thoughts about the two countries possibly going to war?

FH: Of course, I was a young kid then, so I never thought about that. But when I learned that, you know, on December, war broke out and so forth. Japan is going to win, Japan would never lose, because we were completely brainwashed, and brainwashed is something like that. Whatever is taught, just swallow the whole thing as a truth, fact. Like the kamikaze and so forth, the Japanese used to, Japan was never defeated or the foreigner stamped their foot on the Japanese soil and so forth. And I was a strong believer in that kind of a teaching.

MN: Now, I've heard, during the war, the city people suffered a lot because they had no food. What was it like living in the Okayama countryside?

FH: Well, of course, out of the crop which was rice and wheat and so forth, it was mandatory to give to the government, and the government allocated that to the city dwellers and so forth. But outside, if that quota is met, then the rest of them are at the discretion of the one who is farming there. And so we didn't have lack of food and so forth in the countryside.

MN: What did your family grow?

FH: It was rice and wheat, mostly. And some vegetables, but that more or less for our family consumption.

MN: In comparison to other farms in your area, was your family farm large, medium, or small?

FH: It was on a larger scale, yes. Not one piece of land, but the way that they bought it, send the money from the United States and bought that piece of land here and there and so forth. But aggregated, that total acreage was pretty large.

MN: Did you help on the farm?

FH: Sometimes. Occasionally, but not really hard.

MN: What was it like planning the rice?

FH: Yes, correct. Well, it's almost like a grid, because it goes by line. There's a line and a string, and there is a little dot here and there and so forth. And where the dot is, plant right there. Now move it back a little bit, plant there and so forth, to make it a kind of a grid. Because in cultivating, you had to use the machine to just run through that. And so that's what it was. By hand, each one, hand over here and then get a few of them, plant there, and then move to right, get a little bit, plant, and so forth. That's what we did. It's called taue.

MN: And ta was tanbo no ta, and ueru no ue.

FH: Plant.

MN: So plant field.

FH: Yes, right.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.